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“They say the cave paintings have possessed you. That your hand has been o’ertaken by the spirits trapped upon the walls. That your eye is no longer your own.”

When V did not answer, the Bloodletter said, “You do not deny?”

Through the morass in his head, Vishous tried to calculate the effect of his two conceivable responses. He went with the truth, not for veracity’s sake, but for self-preservation. “I…deny.”

“Do you deny what they say elsewise?”

“What…say…they?”

“That you killed your comrade at the river with your palm.”

’Twas a lie, and the other boys who had been there knew it to be so, as they had seen the pretrans fall of his own fault. The females must be making the assumption on the fact that the death had occurred and V had been in the vicinity. Because why would the other males be desirous of passing along evidence of V’s strength?

Or mayhap it was to their benefit? If V had no female who would feed him, he would die. Which was not a bad outcome for the other pretrans.

“What say you?” his father demanded.

As V needed the appearance of strength, he mumbled, “I killed him.”

The Bloodletter smiled broadly through his beard. “I suspected. And for your effort I shall bring you a female.”

Indeed, one was brought to him and he did feed. The transition was brutal, long and draining, and when it was through, he overflowed his pallet, his arms and legs cooling on the cold cave floor like meat from a fresh kill.

Although his sex had stirred in the aftermath, the female who had been forced to feed him wanted nothing to do with him. She gave him just enough blood to see him into the change; then she left him to his bones snapping and his muscles stretching until they ripped. No one attended to him, and while he suffered he called out in his mind to the mother who had birthed him. He imagined her coming unto him aglow with love and stroking his hair and telling him that all was well. In his pathetic vision, she called him her beloved lewlhen.

Gift.

He would have liked to have been someone’s gift. Gifts were valued and cared for and protected. The diary of the warrior Darius had been a gift to V, the giver perhaps not knowing that in leaving it behind he had done a kindness, but still.

Gift.

When V’s body had finished with its change, he had slept, then awoken to hunger for meat. His clothes had been torn from him by the transition, so he wrapped himself up in a hide and walked barefoot to the kitchen area. There was little to be had: He gnawed on a thighbone, found some breadcrusts, ate a handful of flour.

He was licking the white residue off his palm when his father said from behind him: “Time to fight.”

“What are you thinking about?” Jane asked. “You’re all tense.”

V jerked back to the present. And for some reason didn’t lie. “I’m thinking about my tattoos.”

“When did you get them?”

“Almost three centuries ago.”

She whistled. “God, you live that long?”

“Longer. Assuming I don’t get cracked dead in a fight and you fool humans don’t blow up the planet, I’ll be breathing for another seven hundred years.”

“Wow. Gives a whole new context for AARP, huh.” She sat forward. “Turn your head. I want to see the ink on your face.”

Rattled from his memories, he did as she asked because he wasn’t coherent enough to think why he shouldn’t. Still, as her hand came up, he flinched.

She dropped her arm without touching him. “These were done to you, weren’t they. Probably at the same time as the castration, right?”

V recoiled on the inside, but didn’t move away from her. He was wholly uncomfortable with the female-sympathy routine, but the thing was, Jane’s voice was factual. Direct. So he could respond factually and directly.

“Yeah. At the same time.”

“I’m going to guess they’re warnings, as you have them on your hand, your temple, your thighs and your groin. I’m guessing they’re about the energy in your palm, the second sight, and the procreation issue.”

Like he should be surprised at her hyperdeduction? “True.”

Her voice grew low. “That’s why you panicked